Rick Morrissey: Under scrutiny, Soldier Field is bearing up

Opponents of the "new" Soldier Field, the renovated Soldier Field, the tourists'-tax-dollars-at-work Soldier Field would like to see Mayor Richard M. Daley send his convoy of backhoes from Meigs Field to the stadium and turn it into the vacant-lot-that-used-to-be Soldier Field.

Too big and ugly, they say--the stadium, that is, not the mayor.

Much of the reaction to the work on Soldier Field has come from people who know a lot more about architecture than I do. I have no problem admitting that I wouldn't know a Mies van der Rohe from a George Costanza.

To these untrained eyes, the work in progress looks fine, looks suspiciously, in fact, like a football stadium.

We have been braced for the distinct possibility the "new" Soldier Field will be so out of scale with the rest of the lakefront that the stadium will take a big bite out of Chicago and then wash it down with half of Lake Michigan.

But I don't see The Building That Swallowed Chicago.

I see a football stadium, a large football stadium, a football stadium with the type of greenish glass that can be found in a suburban office park. But mostly I see a football stadium.

I see football stadiums all the time, have seen most of the NFL stadiums and many of the college stadiums. This one looks about the same as the newer pro stadiums, perhaps a little greener. The Shedd Aquarium, with beluga whales swimming in it, doesn't look this green.

The most enduring description of the new Soldier Field, however, the one that blossomed almost from the moment the artists' renditions were released, is that it looks like a big, extraterrestrial toilet that crash-landed on the lakeshore.

My standard response has been, Better that than a big urinal.

That's what the old Soldier Field had been for years. Perhaps you're saying that my architectural standards are low. But if you ever walked through the old Soldier Field and took in the pervading scent of the place--Eau de Vinny Who Just Had 10 Beers and His Aim's a Little Shaky--then you would have low standards too.

And, yes, maybe this attitude is a bit shortsighted. You argue that simply because it was inevitable we were going to have a new stadium jammed down our throats, it didn't mean we had to throw ourselves at the first architect who came our way. We didn't have to be stuck with an eyesore.

But these eyes don't see an eyesore, don't see the ugliness. I see a football stadium, and short of hiring someone who could build the stadium inside a thimble so as not to adversely affect the scale of the lakefront, this is what we got. They kept the 100-foot colonnades, the only things worth keeping in that wreck of a stadium, and they built around them.

Like any marriage trying to wed the past with the present, the architects wanted something old and something new, something borrowed and something . . . green.

Maybe they tried too hard to keep the old, cornered themselves out of design options, but they would have been killed by the critics, myself included, if they had wiped out more than 75 years of history without a trace.

Think about the name of the stadium for a second: still Soldier Field after all these years, a nice tribute to our troops. And it's a much nicer tribute to the fallen soldiers whom the stadium is supposed to be honoring.

No cracked walls anymore. No rust stains. And presumably no bad smells, although the Bears have yet to throw a pass.

And unlike U.S. Sell-Your-Soul Field, the new name for the home of the White Sox, at least the new Soldier Field was able to keep its name for the time being. But everything is for sale, and that will be, too, you can count on it.

The Bears have tried to squeeze every last dollar out of their fans by selling personal seat licenses, and somewhere down the line, someone will decide it's time to change Soldier Field to Starbucks Stadium.

That's another battle for another day.

Most of our distaste for the Soldier Field renovation, I suspect, has to do with the way the financing was spirited past us. We're tired of feeling as if we have no control over these things. But the design of the stadium is a separate issue.

We'll eventually forget that there was an uproar about Soldier Field's looks and focus our attention on more pressing issues. Such as can anyone build a new Bears offense?